In a Win for SEO’s and Webmasters, Googles’ SERPAPI “Scraping” Lawsuit Tossed

Brett Tabkeon

The ruling is narrower than some headlines suggest. The court dismissed Google’s current DMCA claims, permanently rejecting the theory for ordinary results without copyrighted content, while allowing Googels revised claim involving copyrighted Knowledge Panel material.

Search Data and the DMCA

Google’s SERP Scraping Lawsuit Against SerpApi Gets Tossed, For Now

A federal judge rejected Google’s attempt to use copyright law against a company that collects publicly displayed search results, handing rank trackers and SEO data providers an important, though carefully limited, legal win.

Google’s lawsuit against search-data provider SerpApi hit a substantial roadblock Monday when Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed both of the company’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims. Google had argued that SerpApi unlawfully circumvented SearchGuard, its anti-automation system, while collecting results that SerpApi supplies to rank trackers, competitive research platforms and other search-marketing tools. The judge found that the DMCA cannot be stretched across ordinary Google results when those pages do not contain protected copyrighted material.

“To the extent that Google Search results do not contain any copyrighted content, SearchGuard cannot be said to effectively control access.”
U.S. District Court order, Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC

The court permanently dismissed Google’s claims where SearchGuard blocks access to results containing no copyrighted content. Google received a narrower opportunity to amend claims involving copyrighted components, such as licensed images appearing inside some Knowledge Panels, but it must allege that the copyright owners authorized SearchGuard to protect those works. Google has 21 days from the July 20 order to file an amended complaint, meaning the case is wounded rather than necessarily dead.

What SEOs should take from the ruling
This protects the legal footing beneath many rank-tracking, SERP-monitoring and competitive-intelligence services, at least against the specific DMCA theory Google presented.

For SEOs and webmasters, the ruling prevents Google from turning its general bot-detection system into an all-purpose copyright lock around public search listings. It does not declare scraping universally legal, excuse violations of contracts or terms of service, or prevent Google from continuing its technical campaign against automated collection. Still, the decision draws an important line: publicly visible rankings, links and snippets do not become copyrighted vault contents simply because Google places an anti-bot gate in front of them.

Sources and Court Documents